


Good Friday

by murg



Category: Original Work
Genre: Breaking the Fourth Wall, Dark Comedy, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Original Character Death(s), Symbolism, Trans Male Character, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 17:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8110663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murg/pseuds/murg
Summary: Who the hell dies on a Friday?





	

**Author's Note:**

> I'm 120 pages into my first serious long work, so here's this quick short story I wrote in June to celebrate.

            Mona wants to move to Maine. Says she wants to live on the beach. I tell her the beach is cold in Maine, and it’s far away, and we can’t afford a beach house, and there are filthy French-speakers in thongs lying out on the sand. She says she doesn’t care. The lease on our condo’s running out and I lost my job last Friday, so I suppose she thought now was the ideal time to bring this up again. I’ve never been to the east coast. I think of yuppies and hard accents. I wonder if any of my preconceptions are true.

            I read the entire wikipedia article on Maine. I feel like I’m practically an expert, or at least knowledgeable of the varied threats that east coast existence poses. It snows a lot, there. It piles so high, that it covers up the fire hydrants. If our over-priced beach house caught on fire in winter, no one could help us. That should be a red flag never to move there.

            We’ll still probably move to Maine, though. Mona gets what Mona wants. ‘We all know who wears the pants in this relationship,’ Patty Smith used to laugh and laugh. ‘We all know who.’

            Patty Smith is dead. I’m at her wake. There’s free booze. Half the congregation is hunched over the body like a flock of vultures crowding for a morsel. I’m doing the mental math for a Maine relocation and hunting for the minibar. There. A lot of money involved in moving, money I don’t have. I’ve been very frank with Mona about the situation, so far. I don’t think she understands the severity. I’m tired and I’m afraid of change.

            I hate the beach, too.

            Patty Smith got nailed by a semi two weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon. She just walked out onto the highway at four-thirty or so and got flattened. I hear her whole lower half got crushed. I imagine it went like pressing a grape, or something to that effect. Probably not what happened, but it’s how I visualize her, Patty Smith just popping open from the top. Her eyeballs shooting out with the pressure, spitting teeth and blood and hearts. Wonder how the mortician managed to fix her up pretty, if at all. I’m curious, but not enough to shove anyone of the way to sneak a peek.

            Who the hell dies on a Friday. I roll my wrist, just to watch the ice clink against the glass, around and around. I shouldn’t drink. I’m not on my medication, not anymore, though. Whatever. This wake’s just an excuse to hold a party. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be alcohol. God knows Jenny needs it. She always needs an excuse to drink her ass off. Might as well make her sister’s corpse foot the bill for the rest of us, too.

            “Oh wow,” one of Patty’s paparazzi says. “Oh wow.”

            “What?”

            “Atticus Palmer? Man, I haven’t seen you in months.”

            “Oh?” I squint, look her over closer. Pale, fatter than Mona, curvy, shoulder-length brunette. I don’t know her.

            “It’s me,” she says.

            “Oh, yeah, hey,” I laugh. “Great to see you.”

            “Yeah,” she grins. Then she stops grinning. And I stop laughing. Because it’s a wake, after all, a wake for Patty Smith.

            “Yeah,” I say.

            “Have you seen the...Patty, yet?”

            “No,” I say.

            “She’s right over there.”

            “Thanks.”

            “She looks...nice.”

            “I’m sure.”

            “How’ve you been, Atticus?”

            “Okay,” I say. I temper it. “Mona and I are thinking about moving.”

            “Oh, really? Where?”

            “Maine,” I say.

            “Maine?” Brunette says. “Man, that’s across the country. Any idea where? You guys got family there or what?”

            “No,” I say. “We think we just need a change of scenery. Somewhere along the coast, maybe near Portland. I don’t know yet.”

            “Oh wow.”

            “Mmhm.”

            “And how’s your job going? Last I remember, you were working for John.”

            “You know Mr. Owen?”

            “He’s my husband’s friend,” Brunette says.

            Ha. I fiddle with my glass. Poor Patty Smith, flattened out like a pancake on the highway on a Friday afternoon. What a way to go. Nobody should die on a Friday, for Chrissake. Fucking awful planning, that one.

            “Something up?”

            “Oh,” I say. “No, I don’t work for Mr. Owen anymore.”

            “Oh?”

            “Yeah.” I wait for her to say ‘why not?’ or make some other social blunder, so that I can, with great relish, tell her that I’ve been fired.

            She doesn’t say anything like that. She starts talking to me about her pregnancy. She doesn’t look pregnant. Just fat.

            I don’t listen. I lost my job last Friday. My bones ache down to my rotted meat core. I’m very tired of this, you see. Maybe Maine isn’t so bad. A fresh start, new faces, all that. I’m not sure, though. I’ve never been to the east coast and I’m afraid there’s a bunch of yuppies and Québécois over there. Maybe we won’t live near a city, then. Or any of that. But if we don’t live in a city, I’ll have to become a lumberjack. That’s the only other profession I know of in Maine. Am I fit to be a lumberjack?

            “I hope it’s a girl,” Brunette says. “Boys, you know? Way too hyper.”

            “Ha,” I say. The crowd is dispersing from Patty Smith’s corpse, bit by bit. Picked it clean, I assume.

            “You want to see Patty?”

            “No.”

            “Is something up?”

            A five-foot-five pencil-pusher? No. No, I’m not fit to be a lumberjack.

            I’m not even fit to be a pencil-pusher, apparently.

            I can’t start again. No matter how much I wish I could. It just isn’t that simple. We built our life here. I can’t afford necessities, let alone a beach house or a lumbermill. I want to slither out of my skin and find refuge in something more palatable.

            “Sorry, I’m tired,” I say. “Can’t believe this happened to Patty. And on a Friday.”

            “Yeah,” Brunette says.       

            “God, a Friday of all days.”

            “What’s up with Friday?”   

            “Well, it’s right before the weekend,” I say. “That just sucks.”

            “I guess,” she says, slowly.

            “I mean, no one would mind getting decked by a truck on a Monday. Hell, most of us probably beg for that at some point—God, Mondays suck—but a Friday? That sucks.”

            Brunette stares at me with dumb eyes. She doesn’t say anything. Her lips lie flat, her face smooth. She just looks at me.

            “I got fired,” I say.

            She looks at me.

            I swish my drink around. It’s watered down, now. The ice is small. “What time is it?”

            She glances down at her watch. “Four oh two.”

            “Shit, I told Mona to pick me up at three forty-five. I gotta go.”

            “But you haven’t seen Patty.”

            I pause, looking Brunette over one more time, then over to Patty’s corpse crib. I can’t see a thing over the lip. Her legs must be crushed. Pelvis, ribs, all compressed to hell. Maybe they blew her back up, like a doll, filled her full of air. They probably did something. I know they put make-up on corpses. God, what a waste. “That’s okay,” I say.

            “Are you okay?”

            I can’t move to Maine. I want to, but I can’t. Mona thinks it’s that simple, but it isn’t, I’m too afraid of sandflies and Canadian separatists on the beach. And we’ll be foreign there, we won’t be Maine people. I’m dreadfully concerned with Maine’s opinion of us. I think of myself, fumbling around a crab shack like a drunken tourist. Ugh.

            I’m going to throw up.

            Moving to Maine, we might as well be moving to Germany or China or...or... You get my point, right? I’m unhappy with this situation. I’m unhappy here, but surely Maine will be worse.

            But Mona gets what Mona wants. So long as we’re married, and she deals with me, I’ll deal with her. And Mona wants to go to Maine. She’s already waiting for me, outside, as I open the door, leaving Patty Smith’s death cult and fat-but-pregnant Brunette behind. The heat hits me like a semi, sucking the moisture out of my eyes.

            Mona’s wearing her sunglasses. She looks good. She’s leaning on the hood of the car, parked across the street. She’s wearing one of those shirts that shows off her bellybutton. It’s the white one. I can see her neon pink bra through it. Her thighs bulge out of her torn up jean shorts. She sees me and waves, the skin of her face splitting open to reveal her teeth.

            I wave back.

            Step off the sidewalk.

            Mona jerks her head.

            My hip crunches.

            Sky slides over my eyelids, past my tongue and down my spine. Pebbles against my skull, grinding into my hair. I arch my back, feeling around for my other arm.

            Wobbling clouds and earthquake asphalt.

            “Atti? Atti, baby, Jesus, how do you feel?”

            “Tolerable,” I say. The sun winks smugly down on me. I bite my tongue and let it have its way.

            “Atti, that truck just nailed you.”

            “It did?” My fingers run over the tender spot, find the split in the skin. It swells and gushes red, then clear fluid over my knuckles, running down the knob of my wrist. “You get the license plate or what?”

            “No.”

            “Ha.”

            “You’re bleeding.”

            “Am I?” I wipe my hand on my slacks. They’re the only pair of slacks I own. That sucks.

            Mona hovers by me, I feel her buzzing, I sense it in my fleshy underpinnings.

            “Why the fuck are we married,” I say.

            “What,” she says.

            “I don’t know.”

            “Atti, a car just hit you.”

            I think of Patty Smith, roadkill on Exit 9A, her empty smile, sagging and devoid of flesh and bone, only her skin remaining like some ghoulish mask. Like she slithered out of her human suit, leaving behind this rubbery monstrosity, a blow-up sex doll, that we’re all supposed to gape at and mourn. And for what. Patty’s off somewhere better now. Regardless of if it’s heaven or it’s nothing, that’s still better than here, I figure.

            I feel very dizzy.

            I throw up.

            “We gotta get you to the hospital. Can you walk?”

            “I hate doctors.”

            “I know.”

            Ha.

            “Atti?”

            “I’m not a Mainer,” I say.

            “I know,” Mona says.

            “I don’t think I ever could be one, not even if I changed all my papers and got a new license and everything.”

            “Let’s think about that later, yeah?”

            “And even if I did—did think of myself as a true Mainer, would anybody else? ‘Cause that matters, too. I don’t think they would.”

            “Atti, get your arm over my shoulder, I’m gonna try to get you into the car seat.”

            “I can’t afford a beach house.”

            “We should really talk about this later, Atti. Come on, grab on.”

            “At least it’s a Monday,” I manage.

            “What?” Mona stares down at me. I have a hot wife, I think. I don’t know how I ended up with a hot wife. This must be fiction. Aw well.            

            “Well, Patty died on a Friday,” I explain. “And dying on a Friday would really suck.”

            “Yeah, I guess so.”

            “I know so.”

            I gaze up at the sky. The sun winks at me, like we share some secret. I wonder if we do. I wonder if any of my preconceptions are ever true.

            “Atti, come on.”

            Maybe Patty left for Maine. Who knows. It’s all unraveled in my head, a bloated tape worm settling into someone’s shit.

            “I bet 90% of people live just for Saturdays,” I say, nodding in time with the blinking sun.

            “Maybe,” Mona says, her fingers inching around my shoulders like shy spiders. “Atti, please get up, we’re blocking traffic and you gotta get to the ER.”

            I curl up, toward my beautiful, fictional Mona, the way a maggot curls up as it’s about to be stomped on. “Maybe if she’d lived through the weekend, she’d-- She’d feel better about her prospects, you think?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Who’s the brunette girl I talked to, inside? She’s fat as hell, she should know that’s not good for pregnancy. The baby’ll suffocate or some shit. Ha ha.”

            “Grab my hand, Atti.”

            I grab her hand.

            She can’t lift me up, so I just stand up.

            It’s harder to stand up when she’s holding my hand.

            Yeah, it hurts. It hurts a whole fucking lot, but that’s pointing out the obvious, isn’t it?

            “I hate Canadians,” I say, hobbling toward the car.

            “Okay.”

            “And I’m going to end this, now.”

            “Alright.”

            She slides me into the car.

            I watch her climb into the driver’s seat. “Just don’t think about it,” she says, fumbling the key into the ignition, her wrist jittering all over.

            “Okay,” I say. I close my eyes and I don’t.


End file.
